Thursday, March 24, 2016

President Barack Obama’s question, in a January 5 address
on gun violence, echoed the myriad 'if we can put a man on the
moon'-style complaints we’re all familiar with — the ones that have
bemoaned our failure to solve various stubborn social problems ever
since Neil Armstrong’s foot touched the lunar dust.

In this case: If we can put a computer in everyone’s pocket, why can’t we do something about the 300,000 gun deaths in the U.S. over the last decade, or figure out how to make the 300 million guns at large in the country a little bit safer?

Obama’s query was also a nod to the tiny cadre of entrepreneurs and
inventors who are developing 'smart guns' — guns engineered to be less
likely to cause unintentional or undesirable harm. Smart gun proponents
aim to call a technological truce in the United States’ perennially
overheated gun debate and apply some good old basement-inventor know-how
to the issue. Theirs is a determined effort, but to date an ill-starred
one: For two decades, as the gun-violence toll climbed and the gun
debate raged, the smart gun effort has only sparked and sputtered."